Note to Dembski: When you post crap like this, you attract brown-nosers like this:

Yes, Gershenson's collection of New Age cliches is just a bunch of words glopped together around the very scientific concept of "information".

But what does Dembski see in it? The whole thing is about how the universe, including life, self-organizes, how life is a part of the evolving system of the universe. Maybe that's it, that it's obviously ignorant of evolutionary theory, the kind of rambling nonsense that Charlie Wagner/realpc would write. Yet it has no place for Dembski's little engineering (yet unknowable in any manner--try to make sense of that) God in it, and it is about as godless on the face of it as any quantum computation notion of the universe.

I wonder if these dolts are going to dilute ID too much for any but their most brown-nosing sycophants. As I see it, Gershenson's rambling New Age thoughts are exactly the kind of quasi-religious garbage that most Xians dislike, and what the IDiots try to paint evolutionary theory as being.

And then there's this:

Quote

I've thought for a couple weeks that Quintilis is a deep cover troll. That passage doesn't change my mind.

That's what I was thinking, but then Quintilis's portrayal is essentially what some of the "leading lights of ID" have said, if not in the patently absurd manner that Quintilis writes (uh, yeah, I'd use a leg for my basic design if I were designing a wing--you probably would, Quintilis, if you're an IDiot). There is a problem in ID apologetics, which is that the people who have no sense about these matters will draw out the obvious conclusions from the general statements that the "experts" say in order to cover up the fact that they have no explanation.

So I really don't know about Quintilis. If he starts saying that sure, the designer is conservative, thus he's going to start with a reptilian forelimb instead of a pterodactyl wing (btw, the bird wing does appear to be a better "design" than the pterodactyl wing--more robust against tearing damage), then we know that he's yanking the IDiots around. Let's see, this designer makes the bird and pterodactyl wings out of reptilian forelimbs, the bat wings out of mammalian forelimbs, and never once thinks to make a wing out of a wing. The designer works in mysterious ways.

Quintilis might be doing the same thing, but subtly, when he points out that the "designer" is "conservative" only by using parts of apparent ancestors, strangely adapting the parts that have been made available to evolutionary change. So he may be a deep cover troll, but if he is he's very carefully drawing out the statements of IDists to the same absurd conclusions that a naive camp follower might.